On journalism versus literature

"The truths of literature are truths to feeling
rather than the truths of experience. Art re-creates. It reshapes. It expresses
an imaginative response to the world. Journalism, by contrast, communicates
experience."

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Strange
Fruit is a remarkable song. Its extraordinary artistic and popular success
has tended to eclipse Lewis Allen’s other achievements. He wrote well but never
as well. He did write one of the great songs of his century. What is so
striking about StrangeFruit is the power it gains by metaphor.
The imagery is as shocking as the photographs the song alludes to, the lynching
of mutilated Afro-Americans in the Deep South.
Stated directly, the protest loses its power. Retold as poetry, it burns into
the conscience of a nation.

‘What is hidden cannot be loved,’
Derek Walcott observed in his Nobel lecture. It is on public utterance our
private thoughts are sifted and refined into coherent shape and reasoned
direction. The jejune, the awkward and raw utterances of the first draft are
processed into something more dignified and intelligent. Between the scribbled
notes and the typed script lies so many inner conversations between imagination
(the writer you) and reason (the editor you). The contrast between initial
ideas and final expression may be marked. Can these two have been written by
the same person? The raw is cooked. The wild is tamed. Anger becomes disdain.
Passion becomes love. An impulse is transformed into an arrangement of words.

One motive for writing is to gain
the respect of others, a hope that presupposes a more generous world than ours.
We have a perception of the world we need to express. A perception is a way of
looking. It is not an objective and definitive statement of facts. The truths
of literature are truths to feeling rather than the truths of experience. Art
re-creates. It reshapes. It expresses an imaginative response to the world.
Journalism, by contrast, communicates experience. By definition, journalism
details daily life which it seeks to portray accurately. A journalist cannot
invent and remain truthful. A writer must invent to be truthful to the
imaginative response emerging from the bewildering mass of experiences
confronting him.

Journalism is written in the heat
of the moment. The response is instant. Copy has to be written to meet the
deadline which is fast approaching. There is no real time for the kind of
reflective consideration which is the finely-honed essay. Journalists, like
learned counsel in court, must think on their feet. They cannot go back and
revise a week later. A week later it is old news and life has moved on.

The disciplines of journalism are
exacting. It is no easy task to ascertain the facts of a situation, to assess
the truth, and then immediately to write an articulate and reasoned account of
it. Little wonder that so much journalism tends to the superficial, the
emotional and the inaccurate. There is insufficient time to check the facts.
The apparent becomes the obvious. All that seems to matter is what is happening
at this moment. Good journalism requires qualities many may aspire to but
relatively few possess. To be calm in the storm is a rare gift.

Writing is driven by passion as
much as by reason. I once heard Thomas Mann quoted concerning a writer’s responsibility.
Mann was alleged to have said that a writer must be apart in order to retain a
sense of dignity in the chaos of public events. I looked up the quotation. What
Mann actually said was that a writer must be involved in the world’s chaos in
order to sustain his integrity. To be lyrical in the cacophony is a rare gift.

Instant responses to the news are
not on the whole what writers do. A very few can forge out of the heat of
political events exceptional words exceptionally written. Carol Ann Duffy can
do it with incandescent ability. David Hare can do it. But generally, instant literary
responses are first drafts at best. At worst they are, to borrow Capote’s
famous phrase, not writing but typing.

Consider again Derek Walcott’s
observation. What is hidden has no role in human community. Communication is
dependant on a certain candour in public utterance, and on openness of meanings
and motives in public affairs. An honesty of intentions is required of those
who enact and of those who report those actions. Discovering the whole truth
takes time. There are witnesses to be heard and facts to be measured against
the general picture. Some distance in time and space allows for a mature and
sympathetic assessment. ‘All my thoughts are second thoughts,’ said Aldous
Huxley.

Literature is concerned with
expression through metaphor. The novel we think of as realist in the tradition
of Defoe whose quasi-journalistic style was legerdemain
of genius. And yet his supreme achievement, RobinsonCrusoe, can be seen as an allegory.
What looks to be an adventure, a recasting of a shipwrecked mariner’s tale
heard in a Bristol
tavern, becomes on closer reading a plea for capital and empire. That is not to
reduce its stature as one of Western literature’s great narrative myths. It is
possible with such a mythos to rework
it, as Adrian Mitchell and Michel Tournier both did, with greater emphasis on
Friday, and in the light of modern conjectures and explorations of the psyche
and of social relations.

Crusoe
is morally complex. It has the richness of literature open to varying and
continuing interpretations. A metaphor is not literal truth. Its approach is
oblique because there is so much in plain sight we cannot see. If Thomas Mann
cannot be quoted accurately what does that say about the highly regarded
journalist who misquotes him? We only see what we want to see. That applies to
all of us involved in the world’s chaos.

That is why literature works by
allusion and implicit comparison. The truths it seeks are those that lie behind
the observable facts. We need those facts. We need accurate presentation of the
facts. We need information about what is happening, and that means all that is
happening not simply what conventional wisdom thinks we ought to know. When we
have an accurate picture of the world we may search for the uncharted
continents of the imagination, the imagined realms where undiscovered truths
explain our realities.

The question of relevance is ill-defined.
There is a woolly notion that art must relate directly and immediately to current
concerns. It is redolent of run of the mill discussions where complexities are
ironed out in received opinions. The relation between cultural expression and
its social context is a complex interplay of aesthetic, moral and social
questions. An historical perspective is
requisite. The work of Leo Lowenthal and Raymond Williams is of continuing
relevance, but of course there are others to be considered. The questions are
radically important.

‘Is it relevant?’ is a question
neither radical nor important. It has a desperate edge to it, a clutching at
straws. The supposition is that art serves an immediate social purpose, and that
is literature’s primary function. It would be better to say that one primary social
function of literature is to stabilize and to shape the conversations taking
place in public discourse. Random thoughts and vague surmises are tested in the
crucible of the carefully written word. Ideas and values cohere in capable
form. The obligation falls on each of us to relate to that form. We do so
according to our personal mindset. However we relate to a work of art, we
acknowledge the obligation of reaching out beyond our private sphere and into a
social world that may not be familiar but which is sure to develop our
responses to the more familiar spaces we occupy.

There is, however, an empirical
concept identifiable as social relevance in art. It is has value in the process
of communication between the creative act and the social world. It is not the
primary function of literature to offer a social prescription. Social
experience is translated into art by way of metaphor. [Picasso’s Guernica
is a prime example.] Art may be translated into social experience [especially
in revolutionary practice: ‘Imagination has seized power.’] These are dynamic processes in the mechanisms
of social transformation. They are not aesthetic principles. We do not regard
literature by subject matter alone. Nor would we require of literature that it
simply confirm our preconceived notions of the world.

‘Choose a subject that is suited to
your abilities, you who aspire to be writers.’ That was Horace in his ArsPoetica,
written in the light of remarkable experiences that few can hope to equal. An
ally of Caesar’s assassins, Horace became an intimate of both Virgil and
Augustus. He wrote from the bittersweet knowledge that hurt him into poetry.
The alternative was something wilder than metaphor: the assassin’s blade, the
traitor’s smile, the demagogue’s tirade. When the fruit ripens it is time to
harvest. Metaphors taste better than lies.